Saturday, February 7, 2015

Adaptational Adjustment

I recently went to a concert at the CSO (Cumhurbaşkanlığı Senfoni
Orkestrası) hall in Ankara, to watch the Presidential Symphony Orchestra play a
program of music for strings and woodwind under the baton of Prof. Rengin
Gökmen.As with all their concerts, the
standard of playing was consistently high, helping to stimulate the imagination
and keeping the audience spellbound.

The first piece
they played, Samuel Barber’s Adagio for
Strings, is a well-known piece – composed in 1936, it has been used on a
variety of occasions.A comprehensive
list can be accessed at Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adagio_for_Strings.

I first heard the
piece way back in 1990, when the theater director David Leveaux used it as
incidental music for his production of As
You Like It, that played at the Büyük Tiyatro (Grand Theater) in Ankara;
and was the first Shakespearean performance I had since I moved to the Republic
of Turkey a year earlier.

Listening to the
piece once more evoked several memories: the privilege of being invited into
rehearsals for As You Like It, and
watching the way Leveaux dealt with the Turkish cast with the help of his
translator Lâle Hanım (I forget her surname); talking to designer Vicky
Mortimer about her set, a giant green circle representing the Forest of Arden;
and above all the way in which the actors were quite happy to have the presence
of a foreigner within their midst.As
that time I knew little, if no Turkish; my friend Audrey Uzmen – a designer
with the State Theatre who had once worked with London’s Old Vic Company in the
1950s – was generous enough to introduce me, and obtain the cast’s permission
for me to watch rehearsals.

That experience
taught me a lot: although I had always been interested in theater, I had never
realized just how complicated the rehearsal process actually was.I also understood then how communication
actually depends on something beyond words; even if a director and their actors
do not understand the same language, they can work together quite happily.To be honest, Leveaux wasn’t very good at
this; he spent too much time using his translator as his mouthpiece and not
enough time interacting with his cast.At the time, however, I did not realize this; it was only when I became
more experienced that I understood the significance of nonverbal communication.

Perhaps most
importantly I understood how any communicative act, whether in the theater, the
classroom or elsewhere, depends on empathy – empathy between director and cast,
cast and audience, audience member to audience member and so on.I realized this only after rehearsals had
finished, when I tried to work out why the actors had been so accommodating in
allowing me in.Both they and I must
have had some kind of empathy for one another.

Whenever I work in
class, or deliver lectures, or converse with anyone, I try to forge a similar
empathy.Sometimes the task can be
difficult, but experience shows that listening rather than talking is a
good way to start.The experience of
listening to Barber being performed in the CSO made me realize this once more;
it was not only a nostalgic moment, but it had a direct bearing on the way in
which I interact with others, whether personally or professionally.

If a concert can
stimulate such thoughts, then it must have achieved its purpose.

I reviewed As You Like It at the following address https://www.academia.edu/395934/As_You_Like_It_at_the_State_Theatre_Ankara_1990